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The DOT gets it right

It's not often that our readers have seen praise for the city Department of Transportation in this space. More often, we've blasted the agency for its on-again, off-again indifference about traffic and the conditions of Staten Island's roads and its outright bungles whenever it tries to fix anything.

But today, we're happy to make an exception.

The DOT announced last week that, as of Tuesday, it will embark on a week-long, all-out assault on the borough's worst major thoroughfares.

In a few weeks or so, driving on such notorious rough roads as Victory Boulevard and South Gannon Avenue in Castleton Corners/Meiers Corners and Richmond Terrace from New Brighton to West Brighton should be a lot less bone-rattling to drive along.

Farther south, Richmond Hill Road, better known as "Snake Hill" -- a heavily used shortcut that is notoriously difficult to maintain because of its steep, curved slope -- is also being targeted, as is Richmond Avenue between Amboy Road and Hylan Boulevard.

All of the restorative work on these battered streets will be done during nighttime hours, to reduce the impact on traffic. But the projects won't be completed overnight, by any means.

The roads, which have deteriorated badly in many spots, will have to milled first and then resurfaced, which means the work on any given section will go on for a week or so.

That inevitably means some inconvenience for nearby residents and nighttime drivers, but the end result will be a vast improvement on streets that have become impossibly rough in many places. Richmond Terrace, in particular, has been a nightmare for anyone who's had to drive along it in recent months.

Note that these are all these upcoming milling and repaving projects will be on roads that people actually use.

That's a far cry from what happened earlier this summer, when the DOT ploddingly resurfaced secondary and tertiary streets according to its fixed schedule and indecipherable rating system, whether the streets actually needed repaving or not.

Meanwhile, other worn and damaged streets that see much heavier traffic were going untouched by DOT.

And when people complained about potholes on major streets, DOT's standard reply was that it didn't have the resources to resurface all the streets that needed it at one time. In essence: "All in good time, all in good time."

Repaving perfectly smooth secondary streets and leaving pothole-riddled primary streets unfixed didn't seem like the wisest use of the agency's limited resources, and a lot of people, including borough elected officials and the Advance, said so.

Finally it seems, the DOT has finally gotten the message and gotten its priorities straight.

Now, if someone can just persuade the city to keep Traffic Enforcement Agents from flooding the overnight work zones to ticket parked cars displaced by the roadwork -- as happened recently along Victory Boulevard in Silver Lake -- this could be an unqualified success story for the oft-criticized DOT.